In the healthcare system, clinician-patient interaction time is at a premium. In such an environment, when critical care is needed, clinician response time to the situation is critical. Systems of centralized monitoring have been developed to better manage clinician time and patient interaction. In centralized monitoring, physiological data from each patient is transmitted to a centralized location. At this centralized location, a single or small number of technicians receive all of this patient information and determine the patient's condition. Any patient parameter alarm signals that may be activated are sent to this centralized location to be viewed by the technician. The technicians use this information to determine the order and priority in which the clinicians should treat each patient. The technician then communicates the priority to the clinician using a variety of established communication means. These means may include wireless pagers, cell phones, notifying a floor or wing secretary, or making a hospital-wide audio page.
The technicians serve a variety of functions in processing the patient information as it is received to determine the patient's condition. Technicians filter the received patient information for artifacts or false alarms that would otherwise waste the clinician's valuable time. The technicians also prioritize and/or escalate the patient conditions such that the clinicians treat the patients first that are in most need of care.
Despite the important role in hospital care management that these technicians play, the current state of the technician work environment is less than desirable. The centralized monitoring station or “war room”, as it is commonly referred to, will often have multiple work stations with multiple technicians working at a time. Each work station has multiple displays where patient data is displayed for each of the patients for which the technician is responsible.
In an example of a typical monitoring station, each technician may be responsible for approximately 48 patients, however, this number varies from institution to institution. Typically, a clinician will provide care to four patients at a time, once again more or less depending on the specific institution. Therefore, it is not uncommon for a single technician to have to keep track of the changing condition of 48 patients and relay these changes of condition to the proper one of twelve clinicians to provide the care to a specific patient. Although this task by itself is complicated enough, another important duty of the technician is to continue informing a clinician of the patient needs until the clinician has responded to that patient condition.
The proper clinician notification requires that the technician remember which clinicians have been notified of what patient conditions and whether or not the clinician has responded to the communication to indicate that treatment has been conducted for that patient. Many technicians must resort to paper notes and other mental organizational strategies to keep all of this data properly organized. The final task that the technician must perform is the evaluation and escalation of patient condition needs. These are often complex decisions that must weigh the need of a patient with a more severe condition to be treated versus a patient with a less severe condition but has not received treatment for a longer duration. The escalation decisions made by the technician are typically based upon a set of rules that are defined by the institution. However, since the process is not automated, the technician must resort to his or her knowledge of these institutional rules with which to make these treatment escalation decisions.
There is currently no automated system that keeps track of technician-clinician communications. Therefore, the technician must rely upon personal organizational and mental skills to process and monitor the clinician-patient interactions. Therefore, an organizational system that provides the necessary information to the technician in a single display is desirable in the field of patient care management. It is further desirable in the field of patient care management to provide an automated system that assists the technician in the escalation of the communication of patient treatment needs based upon an institutionally defined set of rules. It is still further desirable in the field of patient care management to provide an automated system that aids in the technician's analysis of patient physiological data.